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Social Media Strategy, Align Activities To Marketing Objectives For ROI

There are two types of content that bloggers post for people interested in the social media space: news about the space and tactics for execution. Unfortunately, about changes to Facebook or Twitter is only as valuable as it is actionable and generally, there is rarely anything game changing that should change your overall social media strategy. Similarly, tactics can be nice, but if you’re looking to understand what kind of resources you need to drive results they don’t help much.

Here’s something that does help: a framework for content and engagement. There are generally four pillars that a company should design a social media strategy around:

Marketing/Awareness (increase bottom line)

Customer Service & Support (decrease top line)

Sales (increase bottom line)

Market & Customer Intelligence

This post focuses on my favorite of the four: Marketing. Here is a quick slide I put together that offers a framework for how to allocate time and resources to achieve specific business objectives. Generally, you’ll want to address all of these in marketing, but based on the product life cycle, level of awareness or adoption, and resources you should spend time focusing more on some activities than others. After all if you’re looking to boost social media ROI, you need to optimize your resources. The framework below gives you a good idea of how you can do that.

The idea behind the above framework is that there are a subset of social platforms and activities that best achieve one or two of the marketing objectives. For example, social bookmarking done right can expose your message to a large audience within a particular interest that relates to your brand. Focusing on optimizing content for different social sharing sites where your target audience spends time can raise awareness and ideally move them down the funnel.